> Algorithms are unpatentable subject matter under 35 USC 101, so both scenarios are inapplicable.
Oh really? What about SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), US patent number 6711293 ahref=http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293rel=url2html-21763http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293> The SIFT patent cites of patents including computing the Laplacian, finding contour features, and blur difference encodings.
Here's what happened -- someone invented the silicon compiler. Suddenly an algorithm and an apparatus are the same thing. boom!
The TSA has not yet caught a single terrorist attempting to get on a plane.
Nice straw man. Sure, comments like this pass for "reason" on Rush Limbaugh, but I thought slashdot was slightly higher caliber.
The purpose of screening is deterrence. Let me repeat that: the screening is there to deter, not capture, terrorists. Take for example the famous "underwear bomber" of last Xmas. Even Bruce Schneier, vocal critic of the TSA, admits that airport security helped foil the underwear bomber.
From the link: "In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard."
Admittedly, it's easier to count angels on the head of a pin than deterred terrorists, but the underwear bomber was truly foiled by airport security, and his failure surely adds to the deterrence power of airport security.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the Bible does Satan ever have a trident. But this is Slashdot... sigh let the Christian bashing begin if it must!:(
True. However, the Book of Revelations does refer to Satan's realm as Hades. The early Christians carried a lot of baggage from ancient Rome and thereby from ancient Greece. The Roman god of the underworld, Pluto (Greek = Hades) was frequently depicted carrying a bident - a two pronged staff. As any reader of the Percy Jackson series knows, the trident is carried by Hades' brother, the god of the sea (Roman name = Neptune, Greek = Poseidon).
Since Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld, he became associated with Satan in many early Christians' minds, and the Book of Revelations referred to the underworld as Hades. At some point, for reasons unknown to me, some depictions of Pluto/Hades began to carry the trident. I guess it's cooler. Or maybe crueler. Hence the Satan - trident connection.
"Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him." Revelation 6:8, New International Version, also New American Bible.
"Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death." Revelation 20:14, New International Version, also New American Bible.
For another fine example of the early Christians inheriting from the ancient Romans and Greeks, take a look at the 1633 trial of Galileo for heresy for suggesting that his observations prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. The bible never says explicitly that the Sun revolves around the Earth (though the creation story is implicitly terracentric), but the Church, through its tradition of Scholasticism, was at the time still committed to many of the theories of Aristotle who explicitly supported the implicit terracentrism of the bible. Aristotle/Scholasticism won the early rounds, but today Galileo and the scientific method are the heavyweight tag-team champs, and the Catholic church has admitted is error vis-a-vis Galileo.
United States L= 78.0, im= 6.4, cost $7290, 16.0% of GDP Canada L= 80.3, im= 4.6, cost $3895, 10.1% of GDP . Austria L= 79.2, im= 4.5, cost $3763, 10.1% of GDP United Kingdom L= 78.7, im= 5.0, cost $2992, 8.4% of GDP Denmark L= 78.0, im= 4.5, cost $3362, 10.4% of GDP Finland L= 78.7, im= 3.5, cost $2840, 8.2% of GDP France L= 79.9, im= 4.2, cost $4763, 11.0% of GDP Germany L= 79.0, im= 4.1, cost $3527, 10.4% of GDP Greece L= 79.4, im= 5.3, cost $2727, 9.6% of GDP Italy L= 79.9, im= 5.7, cost $2686, 8.7% of GDP Norway L= 79.7, im= 3.6, cost $4763, 8.9% of GDP Spain L= 79.8, im= 4.3, cost $2671, 8.5% of GDP Sweden L= 80.6, im= 2.8, cost $3323, 9.1% of GDP Switzerland L= 80.6, im= 4.3, cost $4417, 10.8% of GDP Ireland L= 77.9, im= 5.2, cost $3424, 7.6% of GDP Portugal L= 77.9, im= 4.9, cost $2150, 9.9% of GDP
USA is not worst in class; Ireland and Portugal both have slightly lower life expectancy.
The study cited in TFA only discusses US citizens 65 and above, i.e. those benefiting from nationalized public health care in the form of Medicare. I think the data unequivocally says that people with life-long national health care almost always live longer, and get much more bang for their health care buck.
Overall, life expectancy in Canada and Britain exceed life expectancy in the USA.
Canadian life expectancy = 80.3 years, UK ife expectancy = 78.7 years, and US life expectancy = 78.0 years (in 2007) according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and that's because Canada and the UK have life-long public health care.
But when medicare starts to cover US citizens at age 65, suddenly US citizens have a much better outlook. US citizens lucky enough to survive until age 65 and receive medicare coverage have a longer life expectancy than their British peers.
Actually, if you go back and study the data at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf you'll discover that the US has both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada and almost every developed European democracy (even Germany who absorbed the disaster known as East Germany a few decades back). For what its worth, the US also pays much more per capita for their lower life expectancies. I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...
I think part of the issue here is that IQ tests do not actually measure what they purport to measure. In other words, IQ is supposed to be an innate and immutable indicator of a person's ability. But whatever it is that IQ tests measure, that measurement can be changed by education and cultural circumstances. IQ is supposed to be purely about ability, but in fact it is very much about achievement. And the latest generation of 70 year olds have achieved more, so they score better.
The words that jumped out at me were "prescheduled programming." It sounds like cable card folks still won't have access to on-demand programming. Probably a quarter of our watching is "free" on-demand (i.e. no additional cost), and access to on-demand is a major component of our choice of cable box.
If the FCC isn't going to require that cable card customers also get access to on-demand programming, they haven't fixed much of anything.
???? What drive thru degrees?????
Many of my grad level courses involved final projects instead of exams. There's still a huge crunch at the end of semester, but it's about the project instead of the exam. Exams are useful for testing theoretical knowledge in mature fields -- such as diff eq or stochastics -- but projects are better tests of applying said theoretical knowledge in an emerging field that a seminar might cover.
Sorry, Rupert! The good folks at SK Hand tools http://www.skhandtool.com/ have had a trademark in SK since 1921. I think you owe them 2/5 of all the revenues BSkyB have taken in since 1989.
I have no qualms with a little of that subsidy being shifted to electric vehicles. If we don't jumpstart the industry, the Chinese certainly will, and it's a damn sight better having production on our shores rather than overseas.
The original article's claim only makes sense if you ignore how economies of scale ramp up and how costs ramp down.
Bush announced Moon-Mars and provided about a billion dollars of funding to "study" Moon Mars. No one ever said where the remaining hundreds of billions of dollars would come from. Moon Mars never had a chance because no one could fund it. However, NASA took billions from unmanned space science to continue to "study" Moon Mars. It's too bad, but since we're not going to pay for a Moon Mars mission, space science is better off spending those billions on robotic probes than on never-to-be-implemented "studies."
Pendrivelinux uses colinux http://www.colinux.org/ to run a linux kernel as a windows process without using any general purpose PC virtualization software.
In about 1985, the then governor of Wisconsin wanted to change the license plate motto (America's Dairyland) to something more exciting. A popular suggestion was
Eat Cheese or Die
Unfortunately this suggestion did not survive. I believe the time is ripe to try again to implement this new motto.
This is not the kind of problem Apple does well on. Apple is brilliant at honing user interfaces. Search is hard work and takes massive data crunching. It's the kind of work Apple traditionally farms out.
The problem Apple has with the iphone is they just farmed out too much. There's not enough Apple controlled stuff in the iphone for Apple to maintain control. Apple controls email, but that's not hard. Apple doesn't control the voice or data circuits, but those are commodities, so not a problem. Apple farmed out maps. That's more of a problem; only MS and Google do maps reasonably well. Apple farmed out search. That's a problem.
Apple controls the browser, but that's more of a bug than a feature because the browser is so feature-limited that most functions that could be done by websites on a full-featured browser (for example, IMDB or shopping at Lands End) need a dedicated app on the iphone. Apple is rightly afraid of an infection vector thru the browser, but the result is thousands of 'apps' that simply substitute for websites on a fully functional browser.
The upshot is the features of the iphone are too easy to duplicate on other machines. Websites do the job of most apps, and maps and search are already controlled by google. What's left?
Actually there is one thing left, but it's also the kind of hard job that Apple doesn't handle well. Right now we pick phones based on how easy it is to enter data without a keyboard. That's pretty ludicrous when you think about it. If we could input data to a phone by speaking into it how amazing would that be? Yeah, I know, voice rec is hard, but when it comes along it's going to be the only kind of smartphone worth owning. And Apple isn't even working on it.
I can't remember if the funding for the supercollider was already allocated. What I do remember is that the cost projections had a nasty habit of doubling every few years. Whatever was allocated was inadequate. I know it wasn't a case of bait-n-switch, but it smelled just like it. And it should have been built on the grounds of Fermilab so the existing ring could be an injector. Too much politics was played with the supercollider.
In 2004 George W Bush gave NASA the ambitious mission to send men to the Moon and Mars, but he never allocated significant funding for Moon-Mars, see http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/ So all NASA could really do was "study" the mission. And even to do that NASA had to cannibalize other (unmanned) space science missions (maybe that's the explanation for the delay of DSCOVR http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0903/01dscovr/ a mission to Lagrange 1 that had already been paid for designed and built). Just like Bush, Obama is not funding Moon-Mars. However, unlike Bush, Obama is not pretending someone else will fund it.
I agree that wasting NASA money sucks. And I know this sounds more like a "blame Bush" rant than I would like. But I think most fans of space science agree that ordering Moon-Mars without funding it was going to lead to grief at some point.
Gringotts used to be goog. Gringotts saves info in encrypted files. You still need 1 password to decrypt the file, but you can have copies of the file in multiple places. See http://directory.fsf.org/project/gringotts/
At least some of these cases happen when the driver doesn't realize his/her foot is on the accelerator not the brake. This is known as 'pedal misapplication.'
In 1986, CBS TV show 60 Minutes aired a program about unintended acceleration ini the Audi 500S. As far as I can tell, the '5000 (AKA the Audi 100/200) is not drive by wire. Wikipedia has an article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_acceleration that claims NHTSA and Transport Canada both found the problem was operator error and that CBS partially retracted their claim. Didn't help Audi's sales though.
Resonant transfer is great stuff, but what we need even more is a standard interface so that all our rechargable devices can recharge at the same source.
Build one of those "linux on a thumb drive" things and do your private stuff on that.
You might be able to get away with a dual boot system; their app on the windows partition and privacy on the linux partition.
Slashdot Mirror
> Algorithms are unpatentable subject matter under 35 USC 101, so both scenarios are inapplicable. Oh really? What about SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), US patent number 6711293 ahref=http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293rel=url2html-21763http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293> The SIFT patent cites of patents including computing the Laplacian, finding contour features, and blur difference encodings. Here's what happened -- someone invented the silicon compiler. Suddenly an algorithm and an apparatus are the same thing. boom!
The TSA has not yet caught a single terrorist attempting to get on a plane.
Nice straw man. Sure, comments like this pass for "reason" on Rush Limbaugh, but I thought slashdot was slightly higher caliber.
The purpose of screening is deterrence. Let me repeat that: the screening is there to deter, not capture, terrorists. Take for example the famous "underwear bomber" of last Xmas. Even Bruce Schneier, vocal critic of the TSA, admits that airport security helped foil the underwear bomber.
From the link: "In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard."
Admittedly, it's easier to count angels on the head of a pin than deterred terrorists, but the underwear bomber was truly foiled by airport security, and his failure surely adds to the deterrence power of airport security.
Can you even buy a netbook without windows?
Unfortunately, nowhere in the Bible does Satan ever have a trident. But this is Slashdot... sigh let the Christian bashing begin if it must! :(
True. However, the Book of Revelations does refer to Satan's realm as Hades. The early Christians carried a lot of baggage from ancient Rome and thereby from ancient Greece. The Roman god of the underworld, Pluto (Greek = Hades) was frequently depicted carrying a bident - a two pronged staff. As any reader of the Percy Jackson series knows, the trident is carried by Hades' brother, the god of the sea (Roman name = Neptune, Greek = Poseidon).
Since Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld, he became associated with Satan in many early Christians' minds, and the Book of Revelations referred to the underworld as Hades. At some point, for reasons unknown to me, some depictions of Pluto/Hades began to carry the trident. I guess it's cooler. Or maybe crueler. Hence the Satan - trident connection.
"Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him." Revelation 6:8, New International Version, also New American Bible.
"Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death." Revelation 20:14, New International Version, also New American Bible.
For another fine example of the early Christians inheriting from the ancient Romans and Greeks, take a look at the 1633 trial of Galileo for heresy for suggesting that his observations prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. The bible never says explicitly that the Sun revolves around the Earth (though the creation story is implicitly terracentric), but the Church, through its tradition of Scholasticism, was at the time still committed to many of the theories of Aristotle who explicitly supported the implicit terracentrism of the bible. Aristotle/Scholasticism won the early rounds, but today Galileo and the scientific method are the heavyweight tag-team champs, and the Catholic church has admitted is error vis-a-vis Galileo.
USA is not worst in class; Ireland and Portugal both have slightly lower life expectancy.
The study cited in TFA only discusses US citizens 65 and above, i.e. those benefiting from nationalized public health care in the form of Medicare. I think the data unequivocally says that people with life-long national health care almost always live longer, and get much more bang for their health care buck.
Canadian life expectancy = 80.3 years, UK ife expectancy = 78.7 years, and US life expectancy = 78.0 years (in 2007) according to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and that's because Canada and the UK have life-long public health care.
But when medicare starts to cover US citizens at age 65, suddenly US citizens have a much better outlook. US citizens lucky enough to survive until age 65 and receive medicare coverage have a longer life expectancy than their British peers.
Actually, if you go back and study the data at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004393.html and http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf you'll discover that the US has both higher infant mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada and almost every developed European democracy (even Germany who absorbed the disaster known as East Germany a few decades back). For what its worth, the US also pays much more per capita for their lower life expectancies. I wonder if this data would change anyone's mind about the benefits of health care reform...
I think part of the issue here is that IQ tests do not actually measure what they purport to measure. In other words, IQ is supposed to be an innate and immutable indicator of a person's ability. But whatever it is that IQ tests measure, that measurement can be changed by education and cultural circumstances. IQ is supposed to be purely about ability, but in fact it is very much about achievement. And the latest generation of 70 year olds have achieved more, so they score better.
If the FCC isn't going to require that cable card customers also get access to on-demand programming, they haven't fixed much of anything.
Actually, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not authored by Homer. The true author was another blind bard of the same name... (:-)
???? What drive thru degrees????? Many of my grad level courses involved final projects instead of exams. There's still a huge crunch at the end of semester, but it's about the project instead of the exam. Exams are useful for testing theoretical knowledge in mature fields -- such as diff eq or stochastics -- but projects are better tests of applying said theoretical knowledge in an emerging field that a seminar might cover.
Sorry, Rupert! The good folks at SK Hand tools http://www.skhandtool.com/ have had a trademark in SK since 1921. I think you owe them 2/5 of all the revenues BSkyB have taken in since 1989.
Somebody (I'm too lazy to find the link today) calculated that Big Oil is getting hundreds of billions of dollars per year in subsidies; here's a related link http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-news/spill-highlights-oil-industry-double-game-re-taxes-and-subsidies-06-07.html
I have no qualms with a little of that subsidy being shifted to electric vehicles. If we don't jumpstart the industry, the Chinese certainly will, and it's a damn sight better having production on our shores rather than overseas.
The original article's claim only makes sense if you ignore how economies of scale ramp up and how costs ramp down.
Bush announced Moon-Mars and provided about a billion dollars of funding to "study" Moon Mars. No one ever said where the remaining hundreds of billions of dollars would come from. Moon Mars never had a chance because no one could fund it. However, NASA took billions from unmanned space science to continue to "study" Moon Mars. It's too bad, but since we're not going to pay for a Moon Mars mission, space science is better off spending those billions on robotic probes than on never-to-be-implemented "studies."
I will point out that the $4.7 trillion figure sounds as exaggerated as the loss numbers claimed the RIAA.
Exaggerate? I don't know the meaning of the word!
Pendrivelinux uses colinux http://www.colinux.org/ to run a linux kernel as a windows process without using any general purpose PC virtualization software.
I have not used pendrivelinux 2009, but I have an earlier version of pendrivelinux based on the Qemu emulator. Here's a link to Qemu USB Pendrivelinux Persistent Linux: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/portable-qemu-persistent-pendrivelinux/
You might want to experiment with both of these options. .
Unfortunately this suggestion did not survive. I believe the time is ripe to try again to implement this new motto.
If you think I invented phony "facts," see http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/us/wisconsin-s-license-plates-won-t-say-eat-cheese-or-die.html
The problem Apple has with the iphone is they just farmed out too much. There's not enough Apple controlled stuff in the iphone for Apple to maintain control. Apple controls email, but that's not hard. Apple doesn't control the voice or data circuits, but those are commodities, so not a problem. Apple farmed out maps. That's more of a problem; only MS and Google do maps reasonably well. Apple farmed out search. That's a problem.
Apple controls the browser, but that's more of a bug than a feature because the browser is so feature-limited that most functions that could be done by websites on a full-featured browser (for example, IMDB or shopping at Lands End) need a dedicated app on the iphone. Apple is rightly afraid of an infection vector thru the browser, but the result is thousands of 'apps' that simply substitute for websites on a fully functional browser.
The upshot is the features of the iphone are too easy to duplicate on other machines. Websites do the job of most apps, and maps and search are already controlled by google. What's left?
Actually there is one thing left, but it's also the kind of hard job that Apple doesn't handle well. Right now we pick phones based on how easy it is to enter data without a keyboard. That's pretty ludicrous when you think about it. If we could input data to a phone by speaking into it how amazing would that be? Yeah, I know, voice rec is hard, but when it comes along it's going to be the only kind of smartphone worth owning. And Apple isn't even working on it.
In 2004 George W Bush gave NASA the ambitious mission to send men to the Moon and Mars, but he never allocated significant funding for Moon-Mars, see http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/ So all NASA could really do was "study" the mission. And even to do that NASA had to cannibalize other (unmanned) space science missions (maybe that's the explanation for the delay of DSCOVR http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0903/01dscovr/ a mission to Lagrange 1 that had already been paid for designed and built). Just like Bush, Obama is not funding Moon-Mars. However, unlike Bush, Obama is not pretending someone else will fund it.
I agree that wasting NASA money sucks. And I know this sounds more like a "blame Bush" rant than I would like. But I think most fans of space science agree that ordering Moon-Mars without funding it was going to lead to grief at some point.
Oops! Current maintained version of gringotts is at http://gringotts.berlios.de/
Gringotts used to be goog. Gringotts saves info in encrypted files. You still need 1 password to decrypt the file, but you can have copies of the file in multiple places. See http://directory.fsf.org/project/gringotts/
In 1986, CBS TV show 60 Minutes aired a program about unintended acceleration ini the Audi 500S. As far as I can tell, the '5000 (AKA the Audi 100/200) is not drive by wire. Wikipedia has an article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_acceleration that claims NHTSA and Transport Canada both found the problem was operator error and that CBS partially retracted their claim. Didn't help Audi's sales though.
Here's a guy claiming it can't be double pedal actuation because brakes are stronger than V8 engines: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/in-defense-of-the-audi-5000/.
Resonant transfer is great stuff, but what we need even more is a standard interface so that all our rechargable devices can recharge at the same source.
The correct name for the Twitter Apocalypse is "Twitterdammerung" first mentioned in http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/04/gop_twitterdammerung.php
Build one of those "linux on a thumb drive" things and do your private stuff on that. You might be able to get away with a dual boot system; their app on the windows partition and privacy on the linux partition.
You could have read essentially these ideas over 30 years ago in a book called "Lives of a Cell" http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Cell-Notes-Biology-Watcher/dp/0140047433